The deployment of sensor based systems offers many opportunities for providing new services and applications in the home. In particular, in the area of home networking, a Wi-Fi home gateway platform may include an interface with an advanced search and recommendation engine allowing home users to access their preferred or personalized content. In addition to that, background algorithms may utilize additional information which is collected in the home of the user to improve recommendations for media consumption or other purposes. Such kind of information includes e.g. time, date, and ambient temperature. In addition to that, it has been found useful to have information about the operating status of a microwave oven in a home. In conjunction with calendar and time information, the information about the operating status of a microwave oven enables an adapted algorithm to provide more insight into the living habits inside a home.
Information about the operational status of home appliances in general is interesting information also with regard to improving the management of power consumption in homes. In this context, there is an increasing demand for data about energy consuming devices. Energy disaggregation is a common keyword for this kind of research activities.
Combining the data collection in the home of a user with a residential gateway makes sense because the residential gateway provides an interface between a home network and a public network such as the Internet. The residential gateway comprises the full interaction between services and devices supported by the residential gateway which provides a number of additional enablers for supporting the home user. Multiple home devices are able to handle multiple media streams. The flows of media streams are directed to the most appropriate devices while other devices are informed about the incoming stream. Recording of media streams and associated information is supported if needed. Thus, in the gateway there is already plenty of information available to generate recommendations to users with regard to media consumption. Consequently, it also makes sense for the gateway to capture context information such as information about the operating status of a microwave oven in the home.
Modern gateways already support algorithms generating user recommendations based on a database about user preferences. Typically the database is built up over a long term. More advanced technologies also utilize the context information related to the user preferences and habits.
The context information includes e.g. the location of the user, activity, ambient temperature, lighting and others. Such kind of information can also include for example the operating status of a microwave oven indicating that at least one of the inhabitants of a home is about to have a warm meal.
A today existing possibility to detect the operation of a microwave oven is to connect the microwave oven to the mains with a radio controlled plug and socket, e.g. commercially available from Cleode (France). The radio controlled socket sends out its identifier in conjunction with the information that power is drawn from it. The combination of information allows concluding the microwave oven is operative once a monitoring software links a specific socket identifier with the microwave oven.
Taking this as a starting point the present invention aims at an alternative approach for detecting the operation of a microwave oven.